I think L.A. has one of the most innovative and forward-thinking jazz scenes in the world. New York definitely has the volume - there's more music happening in New York than anywhere else. But to me, L.A. - it's kind of a gift and a curse.
I have friends in New York that won't leave New York, and they're really talented people, but they'd rather take an acting class in New York than do a play in Florida or Boston. That's just weird to me, but they get into that I've-got-to-be-in-the-center-of-the-universe mentality. I'm not that way.
New York is such a super power, New York can do anything, you know what I mean? They could do anything! When New Yorkers band together, they can really change the world.
The acting training in school was great, but it was mostly fun being young and in New York. Because my upbringing was so transient, New York ended up being my home. I've been living in New York longer than I have anywhere else in my life.
I'm from New York and I love New York and I'm always repping New York, but what I represent is something deeper than just being a New York rapper.
I always thought it's not that the greatest players in the world come from New York. It's just the guys who shouldn't have made it, they came from New York. That's what makes New York special.
I just love New York. New York has energy, it has culture, New York is very diverse. There's not a better place in the world.
I left New York after my mother died and, rather aimlessly, had settled in Istanbul for a change of scene. It was a rather dramatic gesture on my part, since I'd lived in New York for 20 years, but I felt I needed something different - the escalating expense and pressure of New York had begun to weary me.
New York is something awful, something monstrous. I like to walk the streets, lost, but I recognize that New York is the world's greatest lie. New York is Senegal with machines.
There's a tendency for people in New York to think the world exists between the East and the Hudson Rivers, and I don't share that opinion. To me the world is a big place and I try to reach people everywhere. Listen, if I'm nothing else, I feel I've been a man of the people. I'm not going to pretend to be one of those snobby New York theater people.
In New York, I was excited about the music in New York because the only music that I was more or less involved with in the South was either country and western or hillbilly music as we used to call it when I was a kid and, ah, gospel. There was no, there was no in between. And when I got to New York all the other musics that's in the world just came into my head whether it was the classics, jazz, I never knew what jazz was about all, had heard anything about jazz.
There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter — the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something.
Something about New York, man: You can do more comedy there probably than you can anywhere in the world. If you're interested in being funny, New York is the place to go.
The Green New Deal is for elitists who live in their high rises in New York City and see a dirty world around them because they're in New York City. I said New York City can pass a Green New Deal... Why not try it? Why not try it?
New York means many different things to me. It certainly means cheesecake, more species of cheesecake than I ever knew existed: rum, orange, hazelnut, chocolate marble, Italian, Boston, and of course, New York.
New York is the thing that seduced me.
New York is the thing that formed me.
New York is the thing that deformed me.
New York is the thing that perverted me.
New York is the thing that converted me.
And New York is the thing that I love too.